chit at work
A Granola alternative
Granola is a genuinely well-made product and its core idea — augment the notes you were already taking rather than dump a transcript on you — is the right one. The gap is not features. It is that it needs a machine you are sitting at.
The honest gap
Granola runs on your computer, and increasingly on a phone, and it captures what your device can hear while you are using it. For a knowledge worker whose meetings happen in front of a laptop, that is close to ideal, and it avoids the bot-in-the-participant-list problem entirely.
It stops being available in the places a lot of work happens. A crawlspace. A truck cab. A roof. A shop floor. A client's kitchen table where taking out a laptop would be strange. Those meetings are not smaller or less important — for most of the trades and for field sales they are the entire job — and no amount of software quality fixes the requirement to have an attended device open.
What changes with a card
chit is hardware: a card the size of the ones in your wallet with one button. Hold it, talk, let go. Nothing needs to be open, unlocked or attended, and it works with a glove on. It records with no connection at all and syncs when it next has one.
That is the whole difference, and it is worth being precise about what it is not: chit does not have Granola's editor, and if what you love is typing sparse notes and having them filled in around you, this is not that. chit's output is a transcript, an evening digest of what happened and what was decided, and search across everything you have captured.
The pricing shape
The two products are priced on different models, which is worth understanding rather than scoring. Granola is a per-seat subscription with a free tier. chit is a device you buy once — $129 for chit one, $179 for the Pro — plus a $9 a month membership that runs the intelligence, with no per-minute meter.
For a solo user the arithmetic depends entirely on how long you keep it. For a team it usually flips at some headcount, but check the current plans on granola.ai rather than trusting a number on a competitor's page, including this one.
Using both
This is not really an either-or for a lot of people. Several folks we have talked to keep a laptop-based notetaker for video calls and carry a card for everything else, because the two cover genuinely different halves of a week. If your week is entirely at a desk, you do not need this.
Good questions
Does chit work like Granola's note editor?
No. Granola augments notes you type; chit captures what you say and hands back a transcript, an evening digest and search. If the editing workflow is what you value, that is a real difference.
Do I need a computer or phone open to capture?
No. The card records on its own with nothing else running and no connection. The app is where you read the results afterwards.
Can I use both?
Plenty of people do — a laptop tool for video calls and a card for the meetings that happen away from one. They cover different halves of a week.
What does chit cost?
$129 for chit one or $179 for chit one Pro, once, plus $9 a month for transcripts, the daily digest, search, connections and backup. Free 30-day returns.
Reviewed 2026-08-07.
Nearby trades